Status update

Sorry for the long pause, but I had so much things to do I really didn’t have any free time in the last few weeks. Now I’m officially a post production engineer at MUPA at Budapest.

As this is a huge organisation with lots happening behind the curtains I thought I would write a little bit about what we do here, and maybe more importantly about the workflows and gear we use there. The picture above is the big concert hall, which is amongst the best 20 concert halls in the world.

New job, new adventures

First let’s see my role. As post prod. engineer I have to record concerts, mix and master them. Record, sound design, pre-mix and mix tv and radio shows, promos and occasionally films. We have a bit odd, but fully functional archive and obviously we need to take care of that too. My first week was almost full of learning the different rules in the house. I don’t want to bore you with more details, I guess everyone knows what’s happening in a huge building where you daily meet live gigs, theatrical plays, film shoots, etc. Versatility is the key here.

Technical background

We have four studios here, some exchangeable, some serves a few limited purposes. The whole complex is wired through madi optical and gigabit network so virtually I can reach any workstation from everywhere. Live broadcast or recording can happen in three studios. For this purpose we have Studer Vistas (for live mix) with a bunch of outboard gear like: TC system 6000, Lexicon 960, Tubetech multiband comps, SPL eqs, SSL bus comps, etc.

The DAW side is more varied. In every room, we have Nuendo, Pyramix, Pro Tools. This is essential for compatibility and versatility. Every DAW has its own dedicated workstation with around 900 gigabytes of storage. It may sounds big, but due to the vast amount of work, actually we almost always run out of space.

Because of this, every recorded material goes to the Sound Storage, which is huge raid connected to our gigabit network and it is around a few petabytes (constantly growing). After that it’s your own choice if you would like to work from the network raid or copy back the data to a workstation and start your job there.

This freedom has some inherent danger. If you’re not check everything, you can easily ruin your colleagues work. For example if someone is recording in studio one, and you start to copy huge amount of your data through the network, the recording machine will likely to crash or stop recording. For this purpose we have very strict rules and every room has a mandatory checklist you must follow in order to not cause any trouble around you.

After this quick update I will post some workflows, I hope it will be interesting for you, and very soon I plan to continue all the series posts: the favourite sound of the week, shortcuts for our pleasure, etc. In the meantime, don’t forget that we have one of the best vocation in the world.